According to Russian and Chinese law enforcement agencies, militants fleeing by sea from Syria and Iraq follow a route from the Qasim port in the Pakistani city of Karachi to Peshawar, and are then distributed along the Nangarhar province in the east of the country. …

Since late 2017 the leaders of the Islamic State managed to transfer from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan an additional 500 foreign fighters, including more than two dozen women. A source in one of the Russian law enforcement agencies says: “All of them are also in the province of Nangarhar. They are citizens of Sudan, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, France and so on.”

Movement of militants to the north is planned to be organized in two directions. In Tajikistan, the radicals will penetrate the provinces of Nuristan and Badakhshan, and to Turkmenistan – through the provinces of Farah, Ghor, Sari-Pul and Faryab.

Mangal has a long-standing relationship with the US intelligence services. In particular, he fought against the Soviet forces during the Afghan campaign of the USSR. Immediately after the US invasion in 2001, he was appointed as the head of the local government of the Pashtuns, the people to which he belongs. Also, Mangal is loved by the Western press. Most of the publications in the major American and British media contain exceptionally positive information about him, and the BBC called him “the hope of Helmand province,” which Mangal previously headed.

According to the Ministry of Defense of Afghanistan, in the near future the leadership of the Islamic State plans to expand the grouping by another 1.2 thousand militants. Most of them will also be located in the province, under the control of Gulab Mangal and his people.

It is worth noting that the two largest US bases in Afghanistan are in the immediate vicinity of the Nangarhar province, which is hardly a coincidence.

At the same time, the expert community points out that the pressure on Tajikistan and Turkmenistan will be only one of the vectors of the new hybrid attack on Russia. Director of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise Valery Korovin[and here is more about him] is confident that Moscow should prepare for a large-scale offensive of geopolitical opponents on all fronts: in Ukraine, possibly through Armenia, as well as a number of other post-Soviet countries. [Korovin states]:

“… Destabilizing the situation in Central Asia, the US and its allies will achieve several goals at once. First, in this way, Washington can distract Moscow and Tehran from Syria. Secondly, if the operation succeeds, a focus of instability will be created along the path of the One-Belt-One-Road project, which is designed to strengthen the economic and logistical integration of Eurasia. Afghanistan also borders Iran in the west, which opens a new front against Tehran. … Starting with economic pressure through new sanctions, ending with “color revolutions” that will continue in the post-Soviet space, and direct aggression from American networks. Obviously, the United States did not seize Afghanistan, by rigging its military dictatorship there, in order to build democracy and civil society there. This is a springboard for the creation of terrorist networks, with the help of which the US is preparing an aggression against Iran and Russia.”

Peter Korzun, my colleague at the Strategic Culture Fundation, has presented a case that “Despite its recent claims to the contrary, the US is hunkering down in Syria for the long haul.” He noted that: “Last month US forces were also reported to be building a new outpost at the al-Omar oil field in southeastern Deir ez-Zor. They were deployed to positions around the Conoco and al-Jafreh oil fields. On April 7, the area around the oil fields in Deir ez-Zor was declared a military zone by the US-led SDF. That group has already clashed with Syrian forces in the fight to control the province.”

On 25 June 2017, I noted that in December 2016, “Obama and Turkey’s Erdogan, began their joint effort to relocate ISIS from Mosul Iraq, into Der Zor Syria, in order to culminate their (and the Sauds’) joint plan to use ISIS so as to bring down Assad.” And “Trump has been continuing Obama’s Policy” of supporting Al Qaeda and even sometimes ISIS in Syria so as to carve out Syria’s oil-producing region as a separate U.S.-controlled nation, in the event that America and the Sauds fail to replace Assad in all of Syria.

Perhaps the U.S., which clearly was not satisfied when the Soviet side ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, is going all the way to seek a hot-war victory against Russia. Pushing Russia this hard and this far and this long — using even the “Putin stole Crimea” hoax and other such hoaxes to justify ‘restoring’ a Cold War which was actually supposed to have ended when the Soviet Union’s communism did — suggests that Russia might soon need to respond in a direct military way, taking America’s war as the existential threat to Russian national sovereignty over Russia, that it is. The alternative — Russian surrender to the U.S. — seems far less likely, even though taking the war to America would entail global annihilation. Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has said many times — and the Russian public seems to be overwhelmingly supportive of him in this — that for the U.S. to push much farther in this direction will result in nuclear war, and that the U.S. must recognize this fact. Trump seems not to recognize it.

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